Here's a nice, up-to-date table showing how hedge funds are doing.

Yes those funds are secretive, but they need investors. So they talk to places like hedgefund.net which provides the information to the rest of us.

The bottom of the table breaks things out by investment strategy. "Arbitrage" refers to bets that are in theory supposed to make money nomatter what.

As you can see that's not working.

 

Just about every strategy has been losing money.

Joel Schwab at Channel Capital Group, which puts together that summary, tells me they expect October numbers to start coming in, just over a week from now. And they will probably be worse.

Here's another industry score card.

Could hedge fund collapses crush the rest of us?
Some say yes. Others, no.